Italian Language - Phonology

Phonology

Italian has a typical Romance-language seven-vowel system, consisting of /a, ɛ, e, i, ɔ, o u/, as well as 23 consonants. Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian phonology is extremely conservative, preserving many words nearly unchanged from Vulgar Latin. Some examples:

• Italian quattordici "fourteen" < Latin quattuordecim (cf. Spanish catorce, French quatorze /kaˈtɔʁz/)
• Italian settimana "week" < Latin septimāna (cf. Spanish semana, French semaine /s(ǝ)ˈmɛn/)
• Italian medesimo "same" < Vulgar Latin *medi(p)simum (cf. Spanish mismo, French même /mɛm/; note that Italian usually uses the shorter stesso)
• Italian guadagnare "to win, earn" < Vulgar Latin *guadanyāre < Germanic /waidanjan/ (cf. Spanish ganar, French gagner /ɡaˈɲe/)

The conservativeness of Italian phonology is partly explained by its origin. Italian stems from a literary language that is derived from the 13th-century speech of the city of Florence in the region of Tuscany, and has changed little in the last 700 years or so. Furthermore, the Tuscan dialect is the most conservative of all Italian dialects, radically different from the Gallo-Italian languages less than 100 miles to the north (across the La Spezia–Rimini Line).

The following are some of the conservative phonological features of Italian, as compared with the common Western Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan). Some of these features are also present in Romanian.

• Little or no lenition of consonants between vowels, e.g. vīta > vita "life" (cf. Spanish vida, French vie), pedem > piede "foot" (cf. Spanish pie, French pied /pje/).
• Preservation of doubled consonants, e.g. annum > anno "year" (cf. Spanish año /aɲo/, French an /ɑ̃/).
• Preservation of all Proto-Romance final vowels, e.g. pacem > pace "peace" (cf. Spanish paz, French paix /pɛ/), octō > otto "eight" (cf. Spanish ocho, French huit), fēcī > feci "I did" (cf. Spanish hice, French fis /fi/).
• Preservation of intertonic vowels (those between the stressed syllable and either the beginning or ending syllable). This accounts for some of the most noticeable differences, as in the forms quattordici and settimana given above.
• Lack of various consonant "deformations", e.g. folia > Italo-Western /fɔʎʎa/ > foglia /fɔʎʎa/ "leaf" (cf. Spanish hoja /oxa/, French feuille /fœj/; but note Portuguese folha /foʎɐ/).

Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian has a large number of inconsistent outcomes, where the same underlying sound produces different results in different words, e.g. laxāre > lasciare and lassare, captiāre > cacciare and cazzare, (ex)dēroteolāre > sdrucciolare and druzzolare, rēgīna > regina and reina, -c- > /k/ and /g/, -t- > /t/ and /d/. This is thought to reflect the several-hundred-year period during which Italian developed as a literary language divorced from any native-speaking population, with an origin in 12th/13th-century Tuscan but with many words borrowed from languages farther to the north, with different sound outcomes. (The La Spezia–Rimini Line, the most important isogloss in the entire Romance-language area, passes only about 20 miles to the north of Florence.)

Some other features that distinguish Italian from the Western Romance languages:

• Latin ce-,ci- becomes /tʃe,tʃi/ rather than /(t)se,(t)si/.
• Latin -ct- becomes /tt/ rather than /jt/ or /tʃ/: octō > otto "eight" (cf. Spanish ocho, French huit).
• Vulgar Latin -cl- becomes cchi /kkj/ rather than /ʎ/: oclum > occhio "eye" (cf. Portuguese olho /oʎu/, French oeil /œj/ < /œʎ/).
• Final /s/ is not preserved, and vowel changes rather than /s/ are used to mark the plural: amico, amici "male friend(s)", amica, amiche "female friend(s)" (cf. Spanish amigo(s) "male friend(s)", amiga(s) "female friends"); trēs, sex > tre, sei "three, six" (cf. Spanish tres, seis).

Standard Italian also differs in some respects from most nearby Italian languages:

• Perhaps most noticeable is the total lack of metaphony, a feature characterizing nearly every other Italian languages.
• No simplification of original /nd/, /mb/ (which often became /nn/, /mm/ elsewhere).